deFINE ART 2016 keynote lecture: Carrie Mae Weems

Over the past 30 years, Weems has developed a complex body of art that employs photographs, text, fabric, audio, digital images, installation and video. Her work has lead her to investigate family relationships and gender roles, as well as the histories of racism, sexism, class and political systems.

In the deFINE ART 2016 exhibition "Carrie Mae Weems: Considered,” Weems brings together a range of her work that is both provocatively disparate and deeply connected. Each series appears universal in scope, yet also isolates and draws upon more individual themes and issues. Weems’ still and moving images reveal families, men, women and the individuals that meld with and yield feelings of hope, despair, solitude, pride, strife and optimism. All of these aspects merge to form poignant visual articulations of our human condition in both days past and present. And in these diverse works that often look back, Weems urges us to be reflective and inquisitive — to consider them critically — within our present moment.

A commitment to history, to its exploration and analysis as well as to its revision, has always been ever-present in Weems' practice. She has, over the course of the past three decades, continued to reconsider history through her critical and insightful lens. Through much of her multidisciplinary work, Weems has oriented us to the complex ways in which the past is consistently and without fail carried forward into the present. In so doing, her art critically reflects how history gets constructed, layered, juxtaposed and articulated, and often, what roles we — both individually and collectively — have occupied within it.

In a review of her retrospective in The New York Times, Holland Cotter wrote, “Ms. Weems is what she has always been, a superb image maker and a moral force, focused and irrepressible.”

Weems has earned numerous awards, including the prestigious Prix de Rome and the U.S. Department of State’s Medals of Arts, as well as many grants and fellowships from organizations such as the National Endowment for the Arts and Anonymous Was a Woman. In 2013, Weems earned a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation and a MacArthur Fellowship or “Genius Grant.” Most recently, she received the Spotlights Award from the International Center of Photography and the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University.

She is represented in public and private collections around the world including those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City; The Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. She has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions at major national and international museums including the Whitney Museum, the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, all in New York City. In 2008, Weems collaborated with students, faculty and staff at the Savannah College of Art and Design to create “Constructing History,” a series of photographs and video exploring recent American events.

Weems has been represented by Jack Shainman Gallery in New York City since 2008.

The exhibition is guest curated by Isolde Brielmaier, Ph.D.

Reception: Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2016, 7 p.m.

SCAD Museum of Art
601 Turner Blvd.
Savannah, Georgia

Museum hours:

Sunday: Noon to 5 p.m.

Monday: Closed

Tuesday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Wednesday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Thursday: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m.

Friday: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Saturday: Noon to 5 p.m.

Daily admission to the museum is free for all SCAD students, faculty, staff and museum members.

The exhibition, reception and keynote lecture are free and open to the public.

Presented as part of deFINE ART 2016, which takes place Tuesday, Feb. 16 through Friday, Feb. 19, 2016.

All deFINE ART lectures, receptions and events are free and open to the public.